Page 9 of The Mademoiselle Alliance

8

Good God, It’s a Woman!

Vichy, February–April 1941

As Schaerrer and I walk along Vichy’s tree-lined promenade bound for Marseille, I want to look back over my shoulder. Something’s making my skin prickle—not the subzero wind, but the sensation of eyes fixed on me.

Schaerrer’s head turns a centimeter, too.

“Can you feel that?” I whisper.

Immediately I wish I hadn’t spoken. It’s too female, relying on premonitions and feelings. Navarre would never pay attention to a goose bump on his neck.

But Schaerrer says, “Yes.”

“Vichy officials have been visiting the hotel more than usual,” I murmur. “I don’t think they’re coming for the turnip soup. I’m not sure how much longer I can persuade them that Navarre isn’t taking visitors.”

We don’t say any more as we reach the station and step onto the train. The carriage smells of unsoaped bodies. Everyone looks more frayed than a year ago, when we all consumed coal as freely as bread, when nobody dreamed we’d be eating turnip soup and wearing shoes with wooden soles. My gut feels just as ragged. What if our days at the H?tel des Sports are numbered? And why didn’t I realize that a group of people plotting against the Nazis wouldn’t be able to remain in one place for long?

Now that I’ve started worrying, I can’t stop. In Vichy, I have Navarre’s presence behind me. It makes men comfortable, knowing he’s there to clean up any mistakes the woman might make. But today, it’s all down to me. We either get the Marseille sector up and running—or we deliver the British less than Navarre will be promising. Perhaps I shouldn’t have worn lipstick and a sapphire-colored Schiaparelli dress. But would bare lips and a homemade dress make me seem any more trustworthy?

I’d still be young and blond.

At the top of the massive Saint-Charles staircase outside Marseille station, I inhale deeply. This is the place where I was born. On the breeze, I can smell mussels as if they’re being cracked open beneath my nose, can taste anise from the Provencal pastis you need drink only a few mouthfuls of before every part of you—even your fingernails—is warmed. The stallholders’ cries drift up from the Marché de Noailles, as does the fragrance of the spices they’re selling.

I tip my head back, take it all in.

Beside me, Schaerrer’s stance mimics mine. But his eyes are wide open, staring straight at the sun. When I try, my eyes shutter instantly.

“How do you do that?” I ask.

“It’s something you learn as a sailor,” he explains.

I try again but the sun is too dazzling. “Can you actually see it, though? Is it…”

I almost don’t finish. It’s something Navarre would never even wonder, let alone ask. “Is the sun as beautiful as everyone thinks it is?”

Schaerrer replies with the peculiar wisdom that’s so at odds with his apple-cheeked youth. “The harder it is to see something, the more beautiful it has to be.”

“Like freedom.”

Every worry vanishes and a smile like a brilliant “Ode to Joy” plays across my face. Freedom . For Béatrice and Christian. That’s why I’m here. And it’s why I won’t fail.

Schaerrer points to my smile. “Me, Coustenoble, the other men—we can all see how much this means to you. You don’t hide it. Not like everyone else out there who pretends that France still exists. It makes us all want to do our best for you.”

I shake my head. “You’re all here because of Navarre.”

“I’ve hardly spoken to Navarre.”

Maybe that’s true. But the idea of Navarre is enough. And when you’ve been told by the man you married that the openness that’s as natural to you as breath is actually a sickening character flaw, it’s nice to have someone tell you it’s your greatest attribute.

“Shall we?” I ask, still smiling.

Schaerrer leads the way to a café in the Vieux Port.

Inside, it’s lively with conversation, red wine, and the foot-tapping songs of Maurice Chevalier. The smell of fishermen’s bouillabaisse is strong—saffron, fennel, and garlic, like a Proust madeleine that sends me hurtling to Mougins, where my children are with my mother, who makes the best bouillabaisse in the world.

I push the memory aside as Schaerrer approaches a man who takes one look at me and shouts, as if we’re pulling in nets amid the hubbub of the port rather than holding a clandestine meeting, “Good God! It’s a woman!”

I might as well be a hippopotamus. I think that would shock them less.

My smile dies. He won’t be interested, now he knows I’m a woman.

But then I think— Am I still interested, now I know that my being a woman has shocked him? The purpose of this meeting was for him to prove himself to me.

Sometimes being a woman feels like you’re hiding behind an apology.

Not today.

I sit, crossing my legs, refusing to hide my femininity, and lift one immaculate eyebrow. “You’re observant. That’s a good start for an agent.”

He bellows with laughter.

Ah. A sense of humor. I can work with that. I summon the waitress over. “We’ll have ancho?ade and bouillabaisse.”

“For everyone?” she asks, round-eyed at my temerity to order food for the men, rather than waiting for them to choose what I eat.

“For everyone,” I clarify, and Schaerrer grins, enjoying the spectacle of lady David trying to slay the Goliath of convention.

The man watches all this with blue eyes that are incongruously delicate atop a stocky, no-nonsense body. He’s wearing neat trousers and jacket with a dirty old fisherman’s cap and a bright red cravat, as if he once ruled the city, or else was a pirate. On a pirate’s ship, a woman is bad luck—unless she’s a naked and silent figure stuck on a prow—and he seems to think the same lore applies here.

“Tell me what you know about intelligence,” he asks.

“I know that I have plenty—in both senses of the word,” I shoot back.

He laughs even more heartily and holds out his hand. “Gabriel Rivière.”

I think I’m halfway to passing his test. Now I need him to pass mine.

The anchovies and stew are placed on the table. Beneath the raucous chatter of this place that’s been well chosen to render our conversation inaudible to eavesdroppers, I ask him to tell me about himself, wanting to know what he thinks is the most important thing to say in this moment.

“Nobody in Marseille despises the Germans more than I do.” Rivière attacks the bouillabaisse, keeping the broth and the fish in their two separate plates, drowning his bread in the liquid and chasing it down with a good chunk of meat.

My father ate it like that. As do I. My gut makes another of its sudden judgments. This man is someone I like.

Especially when he says, “I know a grain dealer who has access to shipping manifests and cargoes. I know the police and the Marseille underworld. I know someone who can operate a radio, if you get me one. But for this to work, we need a cover story like you have in Vichy. I propose we buy a fruit-and-vegetable business. It gives me a reason to be traveling around the city. The warehouse can be the meeting place for agents and couriers. My wife will serve in the shop.”

It’s a great idea. We’ll have to reappropriate almost all of our Légion funds, but Navarre’s always seen Marseille as the linchpin for the British.

Through the windows, palm trees dance and the afternoon sun casts glitter onto the white wicker chairs, which look like evening gowns at rest. My spirits dance too, and I think I’ve sealed the deal, until Rivière asks, “Whom will I report to?”

A flock of gulls sink their claws into the wicker chairs the same way Rivière’s words puncture my optimism. But Rivière isn’t the only pirate at this table. I’d wager a bet that I’ve traveled more oceans than he has. “You’ll report to me.”

He doesn’t reply. And I don’t look away.

I can sense Schaerrer willing me not to be the one who blinks first.

The urge to throw more words at Rivière is almost impossible to subdue. But I remain as still as if one of my children has fallen asleep on my chest. Only my mind shifts, wondering— Is he thinking still? And if he is, do I want someone so ponderous? No, I want someone like Léon, with whom affinity was instant. But no other man will be like Léon, and that’s a good thing. We need thinkers as well as adventurers, I muse, smiling.

It breaks the impasse. Rivière summons over the waitress and orders pastis . He raises his glass. “If women are now waging war, a woman it shall be.”

—

I leave Schaerrer in Marseille and take the train back to Vichy, watching the sea, thinking of all the wonders that hide beneath the blue—lost cities and ghost ships, sea stars and white whales, a queen conch waiting for the wind to play a trumpet voluntary. Just like my dreams for France’s freedom are concealed beneath my blouse, sweater, blazer, coat, hat, and scarf. Despite the layers, I’m shivering in the January chill until I hear the sound of Béatrice and Christian diving into the waves so vividly that my head whips around.

But no. I’m alone with strangers, and a twenty-foot wave crashes down upon me.

Every night when I lie down in my single bed in my spartan room at the H?tel des Sports, which bears no decoration beyond the framed photograph of my children, the same wave slams against me and I wonder how it’s possible to spend each day with so many men but to feel so very lonely. My hand presses against the center of my chest where the pain feels most acute. In Morocco, I’d worried my heart would wither. Has it? Is that why the ache of missing my children hasn’t killedme?

No. Because the biggest secret of all is that while I love my children, I love this life. Nazi airstrikes have killed or wounded more than fifty thousand people in Britain alone. But in Marseille, Rivière and Schaerrer are meeting with the grain dealer, who’ll send me shipping manifests so we can tell the British which ships leaving France carry German munitions. Those ships can be destroyed before the weapons kill more people—and we’ll be one step closer to freeing France.

Even so, I wrap my arms around myself. Stare at the dusk, that slip of time between my days, which are made up of secrets, and the nights, full of memories of when my arms were like blankets enfolding my children.

—

Pierre Laval, Pétain’s deputy and well-known Nazi lover, visits the club three days in a row. On the third day he says to me, tongue flickering like a snake, “Madame Méric. I hear you’re caring for our friend.”

The inflection on the word caring suggests it’s a synonym for harlotry.

But that’s the least of my worries. The burden will be on you if they come to investigate, Navarre had said.

Laval’s here for Navarre. But I have no idea where Navarre is. Still at sea? In prison? Or— s’il vous pla?t, mon Dieu —in England? It’s been weeks since he left, and I’ve heard nothing.

I say in my most Nightingale-like manner, “I’m about to fetch his chamber pot. He can’t even walk to the toilet. You can go up and see him if you can bear the stench.”

Laval shudders. My gamble works. But he takes a seat and doesn’t bother to hide the fact that he’s watching me for the next two hours. I daren’t go up to my office, where intelligence from the agents we now have in Marseille, Grenoble, Chamonix, Lyon, Dijon, and Périgueux is stacked in towers that rival the Eiffel.

That night, I start packing boxes. When Schaerrer returns from Marseille, I ask him to locate a pension in Pau—near the Pyrenees and away from watchful eyes—to house us, just in case.

The next morning, a peculiar-looking blond man appears in my office. It takes me a moment to realize it’s Coustenoble, that he’s dyed his hair.

“You make a terrible blond, Couscous,” I say, laughing.

“Believe me, little one, if I had a choice, you’d be the only blonde here.”

He’s taken to calling me la petite. From him, I allow it. And I can’t object to him nicknaming me if I call him Couscous, which suits him so much better.

But my mirth evaporates when he says, “We’re being watched. The guards at the station have noticed how often I come and go.”

Then comes the sound of feet pounding up the stairs.

“Laval,” I whisper, hardly knowing whether to hide Couscous or the papers first.

We brace. The door flies open.

But it’s General Baston.

“They’ve just fired Navarre in absentia,” he says, panting as if he’s just run all the way from the H?tel du Parc. “You’re all done for. A warrant for his arrest is imminent. Then they’ll come for you.”

My heart feels like a piano lid being slammed closed again and again and again. It’s the only sound I can hear, urging me to pay attention to it and nothing else. But the thing about being a mother is that no matter how much you might be panicking at the sight of your child covered in blood, you can never let it show.

I stand.

“Get Schaerrer,” I tell Coustenoble. “We’ll move everything tonight, before the warrant is issued.”

Couscous runs out. I scramble for a box of matches, ready to burn the papers I’ve memorized, expecting Baston to flee. But he picks up a stack of papers. Secures them in a box. Then another stack.

“I’ll do it,” I tell him, snappish with fear, not understanding why a man who ordinarily treats me like the grippe is packing treasonous papers into boxes, an act that would cause him to lose more than his job if he’s caught.

“I’d like to help,” he says gravely, continuing to pack.

My heartbeat slows. I rest my hand on his. “Thank you.”

“Today the Nazis arrested a Resistance group in Paris for the first time,” Baston says. “Two were women. I cannot let a mother be taken to prison.”

His words are like the match in my hand, lighting up the dark corners and making me see that this is the last moment where I have plausible deniability. If I leave right now and return to my children, nobody will come after me. But if I flee and continue working for Navarre…

It’s dark outside when we hear the sound of a motorcar.

Is it slowing down?

It is.

I’m about to hide us in the larder when the car continues past.

“Hurry,” I urge.

The fire burns all night. I carry box after box to my Citro?n. I nod to Baston as he leaves. Then I send Schaerrer to Pau and Coustenoble to Dijon, knowing we need to stay away from one another for a fortnight and lay low. Our evacuation will not go unnoticed.

Out on the road, my head turns constantly from side to side. What does a Vichy government intent on arrest look like? How far will they go to track Navarre down?

Every time headlights bear down on me, panic just about bursts out of my chest. I ready myself to turn the car in to a field, but it’s always just a milk van, a delivery truck.

In the moments between headlights and panic, the truth is a mallet, striking me— I failed. Badly . I should have made everyone leave the hotel the first time Laval came in. He gave me three warnings, for God’s sake.

I have no idea what I’m doing and my ignorance is deadly.

The need to escape self-recrimination makes me turn south and do what my heart most wants.

—

On a narrow road leading up to a house about five kilometers north of Cannes, I draw to a stop. It’s early spring and the mimosas beckon; the peach and cherry trees are abuzz with bees. Sunshine envelops the house, as do memories of happy days spent here together.

This is what I’m fighting for.

“Maman!”

Tumbling out of the house come Béatrice and Christian, my two tiny miracles.

But they’re not so tiny now. Béatrice’s head nestles into my ribs and Christian’s is only just below my chin. They’ve grown so much, but they smell exactly the same. I inhale deep, gulping breaths of their hair, their dirty fingernails, the music of their voices.

“I love you,” I say, trying not to weep, trying not to make this moment about the pain and the lost days, but about the beauty of the three of us, together.

Christian draws back. “You didn’t write.”

Now this moment is about the pain. Of course it is; they’re eleven and nine and they have no father and they want me to be the wave they dive into, the soft sand that breaks their fall, their steadfast, beautiful sky. Instead I’ve left them because of a faraway man called Hitler and a nebulous idea called freedom.

I grip Christian’s hand, hold fast to Béatrice, too. “Remember after the Monte Carlo rally when I joked that next time I wouldn’t come home unless I’d won?”

Christian and Béatrice nod.

“In war there isn’t a second or third place,” I tell them, trying to make this ugly adult thing into something child sized. “There’s only a winner and a loser. To have the best chance of winning, I have to play a game, like the one Béatrice plays every night at bath time.” I kiss her forehead. “Thank you for teaching me how to hide. But imagine if you sent a letter when you were hiding—then we’d know where you were. So I can’t send letters. And I have to win, because then we can go home together.”

“You need to make yourself very small, Maman, ” Béatrice says, eager to help. “Otherwise your foot peeks out and they’ll find you.”

Christian’s frown is too old for his face and his question should never have to be asked by an eleven-year-old boy. “Is it dangerous?”

Last night I ran away from the police .

“Only for my foot if I leave it peeking out.”

That night, my mother and I sit outside, backs against the terra-cotta-colored stacked-stone walls. Every few minutes, I tiptoe down the hall and peep into my children’s bedroom, drinking in the smell of the crushed rose petals my mother puts in their bath water, the dark honey shade Christian’s hair has deepened into, the kitten-like sigh Béatrice makes as her fingers wrap more tightly around the rag doll I made for her.

When I step outside, there are tears on my cheeks. “What if I can’t make myself go back?”

My mother wraps her arms around me. In that embrace is everything that’s good about the world—flowers and red wine and garlicky citrus, compassion and tenderness and love.

“Do you remember the Graf family from Vienna?” she whispers. “They lived next door to us in Shanghai. I had a letter from them in 1939. The Nazis beat Tobias and every Jewish man in their building one night. They did something to his back that made it impossible for him to stand. I haven’t heard from them again.”

I hold on to my mother even more tightly.

“The Nazis didn’t even try to hide what they were doing, ma chérie, ” she continues. “They hit and they kicked in full view of everyone. If that’s the kind of violence they enact in the open, imagine what they do when they think no one is watching. Be the one who watches, Marie-Madeleine. I’ll keep your children safe while you do. That is love. Not staying here and doing nothing while innocent people are beaten beyond repair.”

My knees buckle, but she holds me up and I know that if a troop of Nazis marched in here and told her to hand me over, she would never let me go.

—

“Little one!” Coustenoble calls when I arrive in Pau.

Schaerrer gives me a bone-crushing hug. “What do you think?”

The inn he’s found is called, providentially, Pension Welcome. It’s screened from passersby by a walled garden and a wide porch with a creaking wood floor that will alert us when anyone arrives. It’s perfect, so I set about charming Josette, the innkeeper, into believing we’re establishing a branch of the Légion francaise des combattants, which is why so many men will come and go—and that she doesn’t need to keep registration papers for us.

She winks, pulls a pistol out from under the desk. “I’ll shoot the dirty Boche if they come here.”

That night, it’s not me but Josette regaling us with tales of what she did as a child to German soldiers during the Great War, adding ground peppercorns to their tobacco tins, for instance. Needless to say, I give her a place on our team. Our first female recruit.

When I notice Coustenoble gazing at her with liquid brown eyes, I whisper, “Do you still have the soap from Commandant Faye? You could give it to Josette.”

He blushes but recovers quickly. “Why? Is Commandant Faye bringing you more?”

Now I’m the one blushing.

Within days, the pension is like a schoolyard. What was once the dining room is now the operations room. My maps hang on the walls, with areas colored red where we have people bringing us information and green where we need to find people. Recruits sort the intelligence the couriers bring. They always arrive at dinnertime, devouring the trout Josette’s son, Lucien, catches from the stream. My gramophone plays a mix of jazz and classical, and the air is thick with cigarette smoke and the scent of Josette’s cooking.

Soon, Baston sends me a note: They’re still looking for Navarre . Luckily no one thinks “Navarre’s mistress” is worth questioning. What knowledge would she have, besides how to crease the bedsheets?

I hope you know I don’t believe you occupy that position, Bastion’s note continues. Not just because Navarre loves his wife. But because I’ve come to see that you are honorable.

It makes me soften even more toward the traditionalist with a revolutionary’s heart.

But April arrives with no word from Navarre.

Where are you? I think for the millionth time. Without the money the government gave us for the Légion, I can’t pay our agents. I emptied my bank account for last week’s wages. We need money from the British, not just for practicalities, but for hope. Today, there’s only the stale smell of last week’s Gauloises in the air. The couriers come in with messages and leave without the usual gift of a pack of cigarettes. We’ve run out, and I don’t know how long the men will keep coming if we give them nothing.

So I take out my diamond earrings—the only jewelry my father had the chance to give me—and I walk to the pawn shop. I return with enough money to keep us supplied with food and cigarettes for a couple of weeks. The agents race into town whooping. When Schaerrer returns, he drops a pack of Gitanes onto my desk.

“You didn’t have to,” I protest.

“Of course I did.”

April marches on. I still don’t know whether Navarre’s in an English prison or on his way back to France, and I’m wondering if I can sell my Cartier purse for funds, when the telephone rings.

“The Allies have agreed to work with us,” Navarre says.